TALES OF LOHR: "OPPENHEIMER"
My thoughts on one of the year's biggest films; plus, "Factory Roll Call" catches some zzzzz's
Christopher Nolan’s detractors often use his love of complex narrative and editing structures, obsession with analog cinematographic and special effects tools, and frequently controversial approach to sound mixing to tar him as a cold, detached technician whose work does little to engage with the ragged edges of human emotion and relationships. I do think this perspective, while not wholly unreasonable, does short-sell the very real human pains and obstacles that drive much of his work, from the trauma of spousal loss pushing the protagonists of Memento and Inception, to the professional stresses urging the detective of Insomnia to the breaking point, to Bruce Wayne’s alternately embraced and sublimated orphan’s anguish in the Dark Knight trilogy. Oppenheimer, Nolan’s sprawling, fractal three-hour investigation of the mind, life, and legacy of the father of the Manhattan Project, in some ways serves as a de facto response to Nolan’s harshest critics. It’s the story of a man whose clinical engagement with the basic particles of the universe allowed him to carry mankind to the apex of great and terrible innovation, and whose own life was hurled back down to the dirt by his all-too-human coming to grips with the implications of what his science had wrought.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, embodied in a tightly controlled, internally turbulent performance by longtime Nolan repertory player Cillian Murphy, is a man helplessly in thrall to his mind’s ability to break all that surrounds him into its constituent parts, harness those microscopic individual energies, and bring them back together in almost fantastical, potentially catastrophic ways. His theoretical brilliance, far-ranging enough to encompass poets, Freud, and the Bhagavad Gita within his research, places him far above the perceptions of his fellows, and outside the streamlined conventions of human endeavor and behavior. This would seem to account for a personal life that is, to put it mildly, something of a symphony of chaos. His student career nearly destructs when he impulsively attempts to poison a condescending lecturer with a cyanide-laced apple; he openly flaunts communist sympathies that, in his Depression era, could easily constitute professional suicide; and his romantic and sexual life is its own entropic catastrophe. He juggles the push-pull overtures of Jean Tatlock (a quietly electric Florence Pugh), whose socialist leanings are outweighed by her troubled hunger for Oppenheimer’s love; the sometimes inexplicable devotion of wife Kitty (Emily Blunt), who seethingly tolerates Oppenheimer’s infidelities while nursing her own fellow-traveling guilts along with the flask in her purse; and other sexual indiscretions that intermingle the personal and political in a host of threatening ways.
But the military-industrial complex is willing to navigate this minefield if Oppenheimer can deliver for them what they believe only he is capable of creating. The race is on with the Nazis to create an atomic weapon, and General Leslie Groves (a gruff, avuncular Matt Damon) recruits Oppenheimer to supervise a nationwide team of scientists, with central base in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to beat Hitler’s research to the nuclear punch. Fronting a veritable Legion of Scientific Super-Heroes, Oppenheimer battles bureaucratic red tape, the distracted loyalties and left-field mental drifts of his team, and his own mounting doubts about the evil potential of this intended doomsday device to bring to fruition mankind’s capacity to destroy itself.
Once his creation is used to deliver a mass-death coup de grace to the Japanese people and provoke a surrender, Oppenheimer is increasingly tormented by the blood he feels on his own hands. He begins to speak out, in public and political private, against the possible next evolution into a hydrogen bomb, the brainchild of Manhattan Project team member Edward Teller (brusquely portrayed by filmmaker Benny Safdie), and thus incurs the wrath of Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr., pure dynamite). The bureaucrat, who harbors his own close-to-the-vest vendetta against Oppenheimer, covertly engineers an investigation into the scientist’s pre- and post-war dealings that results in the stripping of Oppenheimer’s governmental security clearance. And always, always, there is the rumbling. The blinding flash. The searing flesh. The encroaching specter of death that is Oppenheimer’s real, terrible, implacable bequest to us all.
In a not infrequent iteration of Nolan’s storytelling approach, Oppenheimer delivers its dense, multi-faceted narrative in largely non-linear fashion. The film smoothly leaps at will from Oppenheimer’s ‘50s governmental troubles to the comparatively high times of the Los Alamos days, and shifts from somber color to crisp black-and-white for scenes presented from Strauss’ resentful perspective. Many of the early scenes intersperse the action with quick cuts to soaring specklets, whitter-quick streaks of light, tumbling starscapes, boiling fireballs, and other emblems of the components of creation Oppenheimer can’t help but mentally strip the world into. The effect is of Oppenheimer’s story being told in the manner in which the subject himself processes information and envisions his surroundings, and the fact that the story and its thematics still emerge so cleanly and coherently within this approach is a testament to both Nolan and the work of his editor Jennifer Lame, who will likely receive Academy Award consideration for her work here. The film’s technical credentials are impeccable across the board, with particular praise going to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, whose shot-for-IMAX imagery is tactile and evocative, and composer Ludwig Göransson, his relentless, agitated themes providing a gnawing undercurrent of incipient dread to the mounting reality of what Oppenheimer is about to unleash. The film’s sound design, supervised by Richard King, is responsible for some of the film’s most striking moments, from the climactic Trinity bomb test, where all sound drops out save for Oppenheimer’s halting breath, to Oppenheimer’s boardroom confrontation with investigator Roger Robb (Jason Clarke), where both men’s voices are drowned out by titanic explosive roaring, not to mention the additional invasion of blinding, Lynchian white light that engulfs the room, and by implication the whole of creation.
Nolan’s cast has been carefully threaded with instantly familiar and distinctive faces, allowing him to stage-manage a necessarily sprawling company of players while still enabling many of his performers to make their marks with distinction. In addition to the aforementioned figures, all of whom do strong and memorable work, notably interesting vignettes are provided by the likes of David Krumholtz, warm and convivial as scientific colleague Isidor Rabi; a surprisingly light-fingered Josh Hartnett as politically conservative physicist Ernest Lawrence; Olivia Thirlby as Lilli Hornig, the most prominent woman on the Manhattan Project team; Kenneth Branagh, calm and cautionary as Oppenheimer mentor Niels Bohr; and Tom Conti, smoothly avoiding caricature in his brief appearances as Albert Einstein. It is a testament to the skill and grace of these performers that they are able to stand out in a film so dominated by Murphy’s internalized explosions, Damon’s wry machismo, and Downey’s plutocratic insinuation.
Really, everywhere you look in Oppenheimer, it’s a noteworthy actor doing coolly effective work: Alden Ehrenreich, Matthew Modine, David Dastmalchian, Tony Goldwyn, James Remar, Dane DeHaan, Jack Quaid. Nolan even makes room for a trio of consecutive Best Actor Oscar winners for crucial brief scenes: Casey Affleck as an unsympathetic general, Rami Malek as a scientist with damning evidence against Strauss, and Gary Oldman, another Nolan vet, in a cutting cameo as Harry Truman. Really, if anyone here can be said to receive a bit of a short-changing, it’s Emily Blunt, who works her character’s guilty communist conscience and increasingly overt alcohol dependency for all that she’s able to, but who still makes less of an impact than the more compelling and tragic Pugh, despite the latter having maybe a third of Blunt’s screen time.
In a way, though, Blunt’s diminished centrality is emblematic of a core theme of Oppenheimer, as the potentially devastating interpersonal problems of day-to-day human existence are ultimately swept away by the brute reality of the tower of fire the Manhattan Project erected to overshadow the world. In the scenes set in the latter years of the film’s splintered timeline, Murphy is notably hollowed-out looking, his crystalline eyes gone from haunting to haunted, his always even-toned voice (I doubt the actor raises his volume even once during the entire scope of the film) bearing down beneath a crushing boulder of regret. Oppenheimer is about the burden of genius, and about how one such genius cast his own burden onto the shoulders of all humanity. The drama culminates in a question over the content of a single postwar exchange between Oppenheimer and Einstein. Strauss and Oppenheimer are both tortured by the substance of this conversation, one that seemed to shake even the great Albert Einstein into stunned silence. Strauss suffers for his inability to ever know what Oppenheimer says to his fabled colleague. Oppenheimer, for his part, struggles from knowing his words, and what lies in wait within them, all too well.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
JOHN GIORNO (1936 - 2019)
While not the first cinematic creation spun from the 16mm camera of Andy Warhol, many art and film scholars nevertheless regard Sleep as the first “proper” Warhol film. It remains one of his most idiosyncratic and notorious works: Five and a half hours of footage, much of it replicated into extended repeating loops, of a nude man, in various postures and from almost two dozen angles, doing nothing but what it says in the film’s title. Despite its extensive post-production manipulation, necessary to extend the footage to Warhol’s desired length, Sleep is nevertheless frequently proffered as an emblem of the supposedly standard Warhol filmmaking approach of “turn on the camera and walk away.” The man on which Warhol chose to construct this bizarre, sui generis spectacle: His then-partner John Giorno, a former stockbroker who went on to his own important career as a performance artist, poet, and activist.
A native of New York City educated at Columbia University, Giorno first met Warhol in 1962, at an event centered on Warhol’s first solo exhibition at Eleanor Ward’s seminal Stable Gallery. They would embark on a two-year relationship, during which time Warhol conceived of the idea for Sleep, envisioning Giorno as the subject of the film. Giorno was eager to take on the challenge, telling Warhol, when presented with the possibility of cinematic stardom, “I want to be Marilyn Monroe.” Giorno would appear in several other home-movie-style reels shot by Warhol during the early days of his cinematic experimentation, as well as a pair of Screen Tests in which, if anything, he is even more immobile than he appears in Sleep.
Following the end of his relationship with Warhol, Giorno forged connections with other key figures of New York’s Pop Art and literary scenes, including Brion Gysin, Robert Rauschenberg, and William S. Burroughs. These influences expanded Giorno’s own explorations of poetry, and he began to produce works in the cut-up montage style characteristic of Burroughs’ own stream-of-constructed-consciousness prose works. Giorno would soon expand his poetic activities into a series of installation / Happening-style events, some produced in collaboration with synthesized-music pioneer Robert Moog. In 1965, the creator launched Giorno Poetry Systems, a project predicated on fusing the poetic arts with modern, innovative technological delivery options. The most famous of these, begun in 1967, was Dial-A-Poem, a program that allowed users to call a special phone number to listen to readings from a variety of significant writers, including Burroughs, Ted Berrigan, and John Ashbery. A collection of these Dial-A-Poem recordings was later issued as a series of vinyl LPs.
As the 1960s progressed and segued into the ‘70s, Giorno’s poems began to evolve both technically and politically. He became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, an outgrowth of his evolving devotion to Tibetan Buddhism, and incurred the wrath of Vice President Spiro Agnew, who called him a “would-be Hanoi Hannah.” Giorno also began to change the structure and style of his poetic presentations, with increasing, Warholian reliance on repetition in both printed editions of his works and live readings, where his voice would often intermingle and compete with pre-recorded audio tracks of his recitations. Despite its increasingly overt Buddhist connections, Giorno’s poetry performance style found a welcome home in the burgeoning American punk club scene, acting as an influence on what would become known as the Poetry Slam movement.
In the 1980s, Giorno’s poetry, always fully engaged with his queer identity, took on a more openly activist bent, as in his confrontational piece “Just Say No to Family Values.” In 1984, he founded the still-active AIDS Treatment Project, providing much-needed care and support to many AIDS patients who were otherwise neglected or abused by the American health care system. The early ‘80s also saw a tentative reconnection with Warhol, from whom he had been largely estranged since their split in ‘64. The poet and the Pop artist would retain a limited but sincere connection up until Warhol’s death in 1987.
And through it all, Giorno continued to work, eventually amassing a career that encompasses more than 50 books, tapes, albums, and video recordings. In 2008, Soft Skull Press published Subduing Demons in America, a career-spanning retrospective collection of Giorno’s poetry, with work from his Warhol-meeting year of 1962 through the present. 2010 saw the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery mounting of Black Paintings and Drawings, the first New York one-man gallery presentation of Giorno’s visual works, which heavily drew on text and found material from his poetry. The following year, he starred in a music video for R.E.M.’s “We All Go Back to Where We Belong.”
Giorno was residing in Lower Manhattan when he died of a heart attack in 2019. He is survived by his husband, Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. John Giorno once starred in a film where it seemed like he was going to sleep forever. He does now. But his words and message remain active, vital, and alive.
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